Air Video
Have you ever felt limited by the amount of space available for video on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch? Well, if you have your movies stored on your computer (or external drive connected to your computer) on your home network, then with the right tools you can stream your entire video collection to your device on-demand, giving you limitless video resources with zero capacity on your device being taken up. The tool I’m referring to is called Air Video. Carry on reading for my experience with setting up and using this amazing app.
The Air Video for iPad UI (click to enlarge)
Air Video is a universal app (which means it works on both iPad and iPhone / iPod touch) and is made up of two parts: first, there is the app itself which you can download from iTunes / App Store for $4.19. You then need to download the client for your computer (Mac, PC and Linux are all supported) from the developer’s website.
The Air Video software for Mac
Once the client is installed on your computer, you need to tell it which folders you’d like to share with your iOS device. This pretty easy to do, and once you’ve done it you can pretty much forget about it.
Next, on your device, you need to fire up the app and hit the ‘+’ to add your computer as a server.. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to explore all files and subfolders within the folders you nominated for sharing. File-types that the iPad is capable of capable of playing natively (such as .mov, .mp4 and .mv4) can be played straight away and in stunning quality. The only restriction I came across is that it will not play DRM’d content such as movies you may have purchased from the iTunes Store.
Video quality is superb (click to enlarge)
Now for the clever bit: files that the iPad can’t play natively (such as divx, xvid, .mkv etc) that most other media server apps will either refuse to play or will rely on your media server to transcode with mixed results, will be transcoded by the dedicated Air Video client you installed on your computer. Because this is a dedicated client sitting specifically for streaming media to an iOS device, it knows exactly what it needs to do and in my testing, it played everything I threw at it with no issues and all in very good quality. There are settings that can be tweaked for resolution, bit-rate etc, but I actually found that the default settings were perfectly adequate.
Not content with providing this already amazing functionality, the developers of this app have really gone above and beyond the call of duty by allowing you to remotely instruct the host computer to add the video to iTunes and even convert the video to an iTunes-friendly format first, if required.
Now… I’ve saved the best for last. You’re probably thinking: okay, but this only works when I’m at home on my local network, so I’ll be without my content when I’m on the move. Wrong.
Stream your videos over the net
Built-in to the server software is the ability to stream your content over the net. Enabling this option will give you a server ‘PIN’, which you enter into the app on your device(s). Once entered, you’ll be able to stream your content to your device over either 3G (which I probably wouldn’t recommend purely for economical reasons) or when connected to the net via wifi. Video remains perfectly watch-able and really does mean that if you’re on holiday staying at a hotel with wifi or at a friend’s house you can view your entire video collection.
A video streaming over the net to an iPhone 4
Needless to say , this app makes it to our App Store Essentials list. Hit the link below to be taken directly to the app in either iTunes or the App Store if you’re visiting from an iOS device. Don’t forget the popcorn!
– Air Video
daba wrote:
Ok, this linking system sucks; tried to edit like 5 times using different techniques (and i know HTML!).
So here’s a plain link instead:
http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/streamtome/id325327899?mt=8
(daba has made 19 comments)
Can’t wait to try it. Setting up a virtualbox for XP on my Ubuntu box at the moment so I can run the server, then I’ll try it on my iPad and iPhone. Looks really great – awesome review! Hats off to the devs.
(Mak has made 222 comments)
I just streamed a video on my friend’s external HDD over 3G. This app is great!
(B Gallagher has made 71 comments)
I got StreamToMe <a>iTunes Link about year ago which is a very similar app (as long as I remember – lost my touch and still waiting on iPhone 4).
Are there any feature differences? Should I spend the $4.19 on a upgrade?
(daba has made 19 comments)
I looked for the Linux version mentioned in the article but couldn’t find it.
(millst has made 9 comments)
I’ve had this a week now but just got the remote video part working this morning as it happens. Extremely cool app. Streams flawlessly to my iPad when away from home, but it was very slow to connect with stuttery video on my 3GS. I then went and killed all the apps running in the background and bingo, she was away and flying. This could be something to watch when the iPad gets iOS4 and multi-tasking. The iPhone 4 (and iPad 2?) probably won’t have the same problem.
(JimmyC has made 54 comments)
Thanks Steve, I just downloaded & installed this and it works great on my iPad. I’ve got a library of movies stored on an external HDD plugged into a PC so it’s great to be able to pick & choose what to watch rather than transferring movies one by one from HDD to iPad through iTunes.
I also like the idea of being able to access my movies through the Internet, very convenient! A++
(Matt has made 37 comments)
@ millst: a little white lie, perhaps. I can't find a Linux version either
.
(Mak has made 222 comments)
For those asking about the Linux server: http://wiki.birth-online.de/know-how/hardware/app…
Great review, this was one of the first apps I bought and its just brilliant! I'd recommend it for everyone even if you could only use it at home but being able to use it through the internet is the icing on the cake.
(Andy L has made 6 comments)
Downloaded the Lite version after reading this and installed the server on my Mac Pro and found it worked fine. I had an original flat panel iMac 800mhz doing nothing so after using ‘Leopard Assist’ (great freebie software) to get 10.5 installed on a machine that is not meant to run it, it has been running beautifully for the last 5 days. The app even runs on the kids first gen iPod Touches 8g (this is the main reason I got it as they can only have 5 or 6 movies at a time).
If there is a drawback to this app/server, it is now the kids want me to rip every movie we have so they can watch them.
(mike.j has made 2 comments)
This app is awesome. I’ve had it on my iPhone for ages and it has always worked seamlessly. Unfortunately upgrading to iOS4 has broken the TV out capability so plugging your phone into the TV with composite cables to watch a movie no longer works. I’ve had a trawl through the software developer’s forums and it seems that Apple are to blame, locking the TV Out API to native iOS apps only i.e youtube, iPod etc in iOS4. What a bugger. Hopefully they don;t do the same for the iPad. Apparently an alternate to this app Streamtome still works for whatever reason however from what I read Air Video is superior in its streaming capabilities. Oh well thank goodness for Cidia and TV Out! On the other hand if you aren’t into jailbreaking you can use the app to control the server on your desktop to convert the movie files and then load them on you iPhone and watch them via the iPod which supports the TV out and composite cable functionality.
(daveom has made 4 comments)
@ daveom:
Dang… while reading the review my first thought was; cool, now I can turn my iPhone into a media server.
(Big_Jobe has made 1 comment)